Posted 3 years ago on April 18, 2012, 12:16 a.m. EST by TheSkepticalBeliever
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I am a 10th grade student doing a research paper on you guys. I am questioning your motives, origins, and legitimacy of claims. Please don't slam me for saying this. First Question: What are your demands specifically? Second: What is your political alignment if any? Third: Where are your origins rooted in? Fourth: Would you consider yourselves any of the following; socialist, capitalist, or facist. Fifth: Do you condone, back up, support, or align yourselves with anarchists or anarchic practices? I look forward to eloquent responses.

20 Comments

Ask yourself the following questions. Does authoritarianism solve problems or hide problems? Do people deserve to participate in a real way in the decisions that effect their lives?

None of these questions require that we pigeon hole ourselves into old slogans or terms like socialism or capitalism or whatever. Nor does is it obligate us to align ourselves with any partisan political outlook. Politicians always speak in terms of how "they" can change the world for everyone else, but we think differently. Anything that comes from the top down can only be a temporary solution, and it's almost never a robust solution.

Who makes demands? Extortionists make demands, and we're not extortionists. We're people who believe a better world is possible, and who believe only we the people can make that happen.

The origins of this movement started in Adbusters magazine, when an ad asked people to come and occupy wall street.

No one is going to say they are fascist, because it has a bad connotation, even though it is a more common belief than most people think.

There does seem to be a surprising amount of alignment with anarchist beliefs here, the forum administrator once told me they were an anarchist and, incorrectly, that this would not mean they wanted to get rid of social welfare programs.

And as a movement, OWS remains demand less, so I don't think you are going to get any specific demands out of anyone, although maybe you wanted individual demands.

I never said any particular places where it might be a commonly held belief, you just went ahead and put those words in my mouth. I don't know why you want so desperately to disagree with me, I think if you could get past your blind hatred of random strangers, you would realize you agree with me a lot. All I said is, there are a whole lot of fascists in the world that will never admit to being fascist.

You're Thrasymaque antennae are working very well, I see. A few of his new names are CarlosFenito, JuanFenito, PabloFenito, EricBlair, engineer4, EdiblePlanet and likely this OP as well. I'll let you know if I see any more. He has many tactics. In this case, likely, he's being paid to divert attention away from what we should really be looking at.

Right, but this still doesn't necessarily preclude some aspects of social democracy (since social democracy doesn't require this sort of confiscatory regime). Obviously there's many differences of opinion on this (I mean, there's individualist anarchism, libertarian socialism, anarcho communism, syndicalism, and the list goes on and on).

Anyway, notwithstanding the (loosely speaking) affinity for anarchism among some OWS supporters, I don't think OWS is anarchist in a strict sense. It loosely borrows some anarchist ideas, like challenging power structures and requiring a justification for any power relationship. But I mean, many of our founding fathers shared these sort of sentiments (so it's not exactly alien to American thought).

Now we have desperate and hysterical trolls masquerading as children.Why would any student inhabit a messageboard for the purpose of doing research on a school paper?Why would anybody who has access to the internet need to do such a thing?ATBtrash

If you are doing a research paper then do the research! You will need to form you own opinions on these questions by reading all you can about this movement. Asking individuals what they think is not going to get answers only opinions.